


Aliens Don’t Do Biology Projects!

by lolcano



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, High School, human-yeerk relations, post novels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-04-16 15:38:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14168064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolcano/pseuds/lolcano
Summary: A yeerk nothlit meets his past host one day at work and is so embarrassed that he leaves the country. He is forced to confront his past.





	1. Chapter 1

I had always said that Brady Williams would end up working at MacDonald’s. Where else could he possibly end up, with his personality? He was that kind of guy you see in movies and tv who peak in high school. Brady was loud and inappropriate and annoying, a cocky stupid teenager who thought he was God’s gift to mankind. But in reality he was nothing but a lazy acne-ridden teenager who was marginally popular and completely good for nothing. Grade ten was probably the greatest year of his life. He blew off his studies to hang out with friends, he skipped class to smoke weed beneath the bleachers. He thought school was a joke. He thought everything was a joke. But I always told him that he was the joke. When you inevitably drop out of university you’ll see where this blatant disregard for education will get you. You haven’t put in an ounce of hard work in your life. That’s what I told him.

 _What the f--_ , he would reply, _are you my mother? Are you friggin 40 years old?_

So I guess I didn’t expect that ten years later it would be me who was eking out a living on minimum wage salary. Maybe it was karma, or just an ironic twist of fate, I don’t know, but… there I was.

Every day was the same. I would take people’s orders, waiting as they stared blankly above me, standing in profound meditation, holding up the line; when they were on the brink of achieving nirvana I would cough lightly and ask them whether they could please move things along? Families would huddle together in clandestine meetings, prepping their order as if it were a football play, children ran wildly about pressing their dirty noses against the glass.  People, obviously confused, came in asking if we had hamburgers or French fries, I would politely redirect them, even more confused individuals who came in looking for public transit, I wrote them off as a lost cause.

“C’mon people! A smile goes a mile” our manager would remind us, clapping her hands together enthusiastically. But I could not bring myself to smile at the customers, or pretend that I was happy, it was all I could do to greet them, to satiate their foolish need for social interactions. How are you, they would ask. Fine, I would say, and they would wait, full of eager suspense, until I reluctantly added, and you? Oh not bad, but that’s life, you know?

I did know.

It was another day at work.

Around lunchtime people came in as a steady stream, an inhuman rush of faceless people without end. Slowly the stream lessened. The air hung heavy with indolence, the store was quiet and empty. Ryan was in the back. I was leaning against the counter, reflecting upon my sorry lot in life, when I heard the gentle jangle of the door. I looked up at the man who had entered, and stood up straight again, professionally, I even tried to smile.

“Hi,” he said, “I’d like a foot long spicy Italian on Italian herbs and cheese.”

“Alright,” I replied, “And what type of cheese?”

“Cheddar.”

“Okay,” I said, and grabbed a bun and skillfully sliced it down the middle. “You want that toasted?”

“Sure.”

I put the bread in the oven. We waited awkwardly in silence. I stared at the floor and the counter. The roar of the fan droned in the emptiness.

The machine beeped.

It was done. I put the bread on the counter and looked up.

“Lettuce…. Tomatoes….. Green Olives…. Hot Peppers…. And sweet onion dressing.”

It reminded me of something.

We reached the cash.

“Would you like a combo today?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, and ordered some Pepsi and a bag of chips.

At the time it was something utterly trivial. He was just another customer amidst a thousand of customers. He came back a few times after that, so I assumed he must work or live nearby, but it didn’t matter. Just because a guy orders food from your restaurant a few times doesn’t mean you have to marry him. Doesn’t mean we have to be pals.

Then one came in one day accompanied by a friend. As he talked to his companion his gestures somehow struck me, the way he moved his arms, and how he talked, impetuously and enthusiastically, and I felt a sick feeling in my stomach as I looked at this man, coming to the realization that it was him, really him, Brady Williams.

I felt my world grind to a halt, and yet the world went on, as if nothing out of the usual had occurred.

 “I can take the next person in line,” Eileen called. 

 “Hey,” he said, “I’d like a cold cut foot long on an Italian herbs and cheese.”

“Okay, great! What kind of cheese do you want?”

“Cheddar.”

“Toasted or non-toasted?”

“I’ll have it toasted, thanks.”

The beeping of the machine awoke me from my stupor and I pulled out a toasted sub and placed it in front of me, looking around uncertain as to whom it belonged. But despite it all the sandwiches somehow moved down the assembly line with inexorable motion. The machine beeped and I pulled out another sub and looking up I saw that it was his, my heart sped up, I avoided his eyes and mumbled, “What would you like?”

I stared at the vegetables, refusing to look up, I squeezed the bottle too tightly and put on far too much sauce, but he said nothing, just a slightly strained smile as I passed to him his sub.  As I packed up his sandwich I watched entranced, as he pulled the money from his wallet, fumbling slightly as he gathered the bills and handed me the money. The way he walked, the way he looked, the way he talked.... It was so obvious. How had I not seen it? I saw in him now all the familiarities, all the little quirks and aspects of his person which I knew almost as well as my own…

But then, he was different, too, I observed. Had he dyed his hair? No, I realized… No, this was his natural colour. That’s right, during high school he had bleached it. But he looked older now. His face was older, I observed the faint wrinkles on his face that were never there before.

He looked up at me and I averted my eyes, struck with sudden terror that he would recognize me, that he would realize who I was. But how could he? He had never seen me. Not like this. To him I was just another person, as he had been to me, at first. But surely he must know. Maybe he had known all along. It felt too strange for me to know him but for him not to know me. Impossible even. I glanced up quickly and watched him stand by the other counter, waiting as his friend paid. He was laughing at something his friend had said. It was that same stupid smile, that same stupid laugh. But then… There was something solemn in his eyes that remained there, quietly serious, even when he laughed. I was struck again by how much older he seemed. And somehow I felt it was my fault.

In front of me a woman asked if I was okay and if I could please take her order? “…Right,” I said, but from the corner of my eye could not stop glancing at him with quick fleeting glances, afraid to look directly and yet unable to look away. I was reeling with disbelief and astonishment. It was like the past, which I had worked so very hard to ignore, had all of a sudden flashed me the middle finger, walked right into my work and punched me in the face.

“Uh…What would you like?”

“I would like,” she said, perhaps assuming I was a little slow, “pickles….green olives…. Tomatoes….and lettuce…. ”

“Right…” I said again, staring at the green things in front of me, trying to remember the difference between a pepper and an olive. Finally I wrapped up the woman’s sub, glancing up one more time at where Brady had stood. But he was gone.

I took a shaky breath and told myself to pull yourself together, man. My heart was pounding rapidly in my eyes. Why wouldn’t it stop? It pumped quicker and quicker, thudding heavily against my chest, rushing past my ears.

_What’s the problem, feeling guilty all of a sudden? Should have thought of that before you ruined g--------- life._

His voice echoed in my head. It was as if I could hear him again, yelling at me, helplessly, his mind plunged in a whirling, ceaseless despair. 


	2. Chapter 2

Some years ago

 “Well shit,” Brady said. He sat contemplatively for a moment, then asked: “Can I borrow a pencil?”

Denis laughed incredulously. “What the hell, you seriously don’t have a pencil?” He leaned, half-sitting, on Brady’s desk, his eyes glittering with amusement.

They were in science class. The desks in the center of the room were surrounded on all sides by a dark black counter, which in turn was ringed in by closets of beakers and test tubes.

“I lost it, okay” Brady said plaintively, “But I didn’t think I’d need it!”

Because, apparently, he didn’t feel that pencils were essential tools for class, that he could get by without taking notes or even paying attention.

“Haha no shit. Well, _I’m_ not giving you one. Stop mooching off me, loser.”

Only, they used worse language than that. That’s the way Brady was. Crude and useless. You see, Brady was in the habit of going to class with nothing but the clothes on his back. Things like a pencil or a notebook he did not consider useful. Schoolwork and learning was to him was only an unfortunate side-effect of school, which he only attended because his parents made him, and because here he could meet with his friends. Taking notes, I suppose, would have only hindered him in his goals.

This nonchalant attitude was something I never really understood. Knowledge was something mystical and godlike to me. It was knowledge, beautiful knowledge, the all availing light of Truth, which had allowed us to burst forth from the murky pools of our dark and primitive planet and bring the vast array of stars into our grasp. Similarly, had not knowledge propelled mankind into this glorious world of their own creation, this great sprawling city with its gleaming glass buildings that reached into the heavens? They have formed the world in their own image, all of nature laying prostrate at their feet.

I hated humans, really, but this I admired about them. In that way they were similar to us. Humans may look at us with disgust, but our situations are similar. After all, looking at an Andalite you can see the natural grace and lithe power which lays coiled in their body. And when you at a hork-bajiir, you are immediately struck by its dignified strength. But looking at a human, who could tell that they are the dominant beings of their planet? The only thing they’ve got going for them is that they’re smart. Maybe even smarter than yeerks. They’ve stored up generation after generation new layers upon the last of knowledge, this vast collection gradually growing upwards until it teeters high in the sky, towering above mankind which it has surpassed.

But alas, I would lament to myself, this great repository of knowledge, carefully guarded and built up with care over the ages, the sum of a thousand years of people’s hopes and dreams, for which people have died for and lived for, all this knowledge is thrown away by a petulant prepubescent boy because it bores him.

 _Oh shut up_ , he said, _you pretentious little shit._

Heh. You really are stupid, I told him.

_That’s not - …!_

True. He didn’t finish the sentence but I knew what he meant. I could see it. The mind speaks a language that words can’t describe. Strange forms, images what could have been. Futile rage. Stoic sadness. Falling downwards, helplessly. He could not move, he could not reach out to that failing future. Dark and inescapable as a black hole, that was despair.

He raged wordlessly against me.

Can’t even find words to express himself. Maybe he should have paid attention in English class after all. Then he could write a poem about it. Haha. Too bad he’s too _stuuuuupid._

 _You fucking_ –

So very eloquent.

He hated it when I called him stupid. That’s why I said it.

“Well okay,” Brady said to Denis, “Like, are we talking a little quiz here or an honest to god test? I mean, if I fail this one, will I fail the course?”

“Dunno? You pass the other ones?”

“Uhh...”

“haha man, why you even taking this class? You even pay attention?”

“Hey man,” he protested, “I paid hella attention. You don’t even know how much attention I paid. Like, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. And all that shit. So what’s the test on anyway?”

“Haha, what’s the test on?! Dude you’re gonna fail so hard. No it’s gonna be on all the stuff, um, from like, the circulatory system onwards I think? Everything from the start of the unit.”

 “Shiiiiiit.”

The bell rang. There was an immediate straightening, a shuffling of papers and squeak of desks, as everything aligned to how it should be. Or mostly. I guess things are never wholly how they should be. That’s what it means to live in an unjust world. Haha.

_Oh, you’re real funny._

“Denis! Sit down,” rapped out their teacher briskly, “Everyone in your seat. I’m going to pass out the test in five minutes.”

Denis shrugged. “Good luck~,” he sang to Brady as he left.

“Hey, wait, Denis,” Brady whispered frantically, “Seriously, I need a pencil - !!”

Denis was already at his desk. He shrugged and shook his head, smiling flippantly. You’re on your own this time, bub. All this without speaking. Brady flashed him the middle finger, and, I suppose, it was equally expressive in his own crude way.

“Um, Miss Baker,” he said loudly, then after already calling out thrust his hand into the air, “I don’t have a pencil.”

“And what am I supposed to do about that,” she said. She began to pass out the test.

“Uh, can I go get one?”

“Look Brady, I don’t care what you have to do, but when this test gets to your desk, I expect you to have some kind of writing utensil in your hand.”

He was thinking over whether this meant he should go back to his locker, which may or may not have had a pencil hidden somewhere within its deluge of discarded papers and forgotten forms and decaying apple cores, or walk through the school until he found one of those ubiquitous chewed up pencils on the ground, when a blue and pink patterned mechanical pencil appeared on his desk.

“Use this for now,” said Sophia. Our desks were pulled apart, artificially for the test. She had reached across this divide just for me, to deliver this pencil, neat and tidy and pristine, just like everything about her, to Brady.

 “Just give it back after class,” she told me.

“Wow,” Brady said, “Thanks, Sophia.”

 “Well, good luck,” said Sophia grimly, and turned back to her desk, where she sat pale and nervous, like a prisoner before execution day. I don’t know why she always got so nervous before tests. Everyone already knew she would do well. But me…?

I had always found that terribly unfair.

The test came. It appeared before me, white and blank, pregnant with expectations. And I thought to myself: how well should I do on the test this time? Because I had to choose. In the meantime I chewed on the pencil out of habit, then remembering that it belonged to Sophia, desisted and tried in vain to rub away the saliva and pockmarks Brady’s teeth had already made in the eraser. I stared at the test, making a great show of appearing to be puzzled by it, in case anyone was watching.

The first question. Identify the structures of the human respiratory system and identify their functions. Well Brady, do you know?

_Shut up!_

I ignored him. Well, I suppose it didn’t matter to him, after all, how the human body worked. Since it didn’t belong to him anyway.

_It doesn’t belong to you either!_

There was a question on the human respiratory. I began to think of my own breathing.

 _See_ , Brady was saying, _you don’t control me. You didn’t even realize you were breathing until just now._

I wondered if I could, if I wanted to, stop his heart through the power of my own will.

_I bet you can’t. I tried to hold my breath once when I was a kid, but I couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it either._

Yeah, you want me to try it? He was so annoying.

_Yeah, try it._

I could do it you know. But then I’d be without a host. So excuse me while I go fail this test. And because someone’s such an idiot, I really do have to fail.

You’re _the one,_ he said, _who’s gonna fail._

_So who’s the idiot?_

Maybe he was right. And that’s exactly why I hated him.  

When class was over I handed the pencil back to Sophia.

“Thanks Sophia,” I told her, “You’re a real life-saver.”

“No problem,” she said, taking the pencil back with a polite smile.

“On second thought,” she said, looking it over, “You can keep it. You probably need it more than I do.”

“Really?”  She had probably noticed the teeth marks.

“Sure,” she replied, looking toward the door where her friends were leaving, “Just try not to lose it.”

“Thanks Sophia.”

“Yeah. See you later.”

She hurried off.

 _You know, she’s pretty hot_ , Brady could not help but think, looking at her butt.

God, I hated him.


	3. Chapter 3

The Present

Above all I hoped that I would not see him again. I mean, it’s not like he was going to be at my work all the time. And it’s not like _I_ was going to be at my work all the time. But inevitably, there would come a time when both he was there, and I was there, and then… And then… He would know who I was. I knew that he would. And it terrified me.

When I showed up at work the next day, I couldn’t escape the fear that in a moment the door would open and he would be there. Every time I heard it ring my heart skipped a beat. Before I even looked up, I knew it must be him. But then I glanced upwards and every time it was someone else, a stranger, but when the door opened again my heart contracted nonetheless, because this time, surely, it would be him. He would come in and he would read my nametag and realize who I was and then...

I could never get past this point in my thoughts. I wasn’t thinking at all, really.

Because what did I think would happen? He couldn’t arrest me. He couldn’t hurt me. I had every right to be here. But…. the thought that he would recognize me frightened me. Overwhelmed me. Because he would _know_. He knew who I was. Who I really was.

Later I told myself that maybe it was not Brady that I feared, but what he represented. That is, to see him was to stare into a mirror, to confront him was to confront myself, and my own actions. Or to see him again now would be to repudiate the image I had built up of him in the past years, the crude self-parody of his being which I had acted out. This image, which I relied upon, could not be broken down. Or maybe I was afraid that his image of _me_ would be broken. I, the powerful, might, arrogant master, lording it over the poor helpless slave. If he could see what I had become…

But these are all theories that I constructed latter on to explain my actions. They sound very profound and no doubt have a basis in truth, but at the time I acted only on emotion, not knowing what I was feeling, trying to push away this shadow of fear that engulfed me only to find myself mired in it.

To see him again would be to admit my own guilt.

So I left.

Maybe it was cowardly. Or maybe it was the final push for something I had decided to do long ago. In any case, I couldn’t live with the overwhelming fear that one day the door would open and he would come in. I had to leave. I had to run away, go somewhere far away.

So I left.

I packed my packs and I left.

It was night time when the plane took off. I stared out the window at the rapidly decreasing lights, which twinkled below me like a series of stars, until at last they disappeared beneath the clouds. We hurtled through the darkness, heading as if to nowhere. Sitting here high above the earth, my past descending behind me, I hoped to feel some sense of liberation. But all I felt was a vague discontent and a lingering shame.


	4. Chapter 4

 “Okay,” said Miss Lee, “so equation is f(x) = -|x-3|. What transformations do I have to apply to the base function if I wanted to graph this equation?”

Vertical flip and a horizontal shift to the right.

“Anybody?” she asked again.

We sat as if in a trance, everyone looking downwards at their notes, unmoving, afraid that if they moved, they would break the spell. The room was stagnant, enclosed and windowless, artificial light filtered over the desks. My desk, in a pod of four, pointed away from the board, I stared at a poster of space. _Aim for the moon. That way even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars..._ The teacher, a slim, slightly built Asian woman, stood delicately in front of the chalkboard, leaning forward toward us in expectation, as if we were about to confide to her a deep hidden secret of the universe.

 Finally, Morgan Pamic coughed.

“Yes, Morgan?” asked Miss Lee hopefully.

“Uhhhhhh....It flips, right?”

“That’s _right_ , Morgan!” she said, as always unfailingly cheerful, “The negative sign means the function flips!”

“But,” she asked, “Do you know, is it a horizontal flip or a vertical flip? ...Anyone?”

Vertical. It was a vertical flip. God, it was so simple. Why didn’t anybody raise their hand? Were they really too stupid? Or did nobody care?

Owen Parker raised his hand. “It’s a vertical flip, right?”

She clapped her hands in delight.

“Yes, Owen, very good!”

Did she really enjoy this? Was she high or something? What kind of drugs did this teacher take so that she was able to be happy dealing with idiots all the time?

“Okay, so the negative five will become positive five,” she said, plotting the points out on the blackboard, “and the negative three will become a positive three...”

I rested my head in my hands and sighed. I fiddled with my pencil, then began to carve a picture of a pirate on the desk. This was property damage, yes, but it was Brady’s fault and not mine.

“Miss Lee,” said Kathy Prior, waving her hand in the air, “I have a question.”

Ugh. Kathy. She always asked too many questions. Like, it’s really not that hard Kathy! But the teacher just smiled.

 “Yes Kathy?” she asked.

“So if the negative sign was _inside_ the absolute value function, would it have been a horizontal flip?”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said, and explained it again.

Of course it would be a horizontal flip. Why do you feel the need to ask that? Was that not already very obvious? A negative sign inside the inner body means a horizontal flip not only for absolute value functions but also parabolas, for exponential functions and rational functions too. Have we not been going over this for weeks now?

“Okay, let’s move on to the next part. The negative three here means that we move the function in which direction? Anyone?”

Right. We’d move it to the right.

*.*.*.*

“So I don’t get why Johanna’s mad with me,” Zachary said despondently.

They were standing outside the school near the field, against the high brick wall were ivy grew.

 “Forget about her man,” Jason advised, “She’s such a drama queen.”

“Yeah, I want to…” said Zachary, “but I mean, it’s not so easy….”

“What, I thought you guys made up?” asked Denis.

“I dunno man I’m so confused!”

“Why are you confused?! You’re either made up or you’re not!”

“Well, I mean, I thought we were, but maybe, I dunno? She’s been giving me the cold shoulder and I don’t know what I did.”

“Dude. Girls are weird.”

 “Oh, there’s Yasin,” said Brady, “Hey Yasin, hurry up already, huh!”

Yasin waved at them merrily and approached them carrying a soccer ball. Zachary began to perk up.

“Oh, hey, I scored like, the best goal the other day. Jason was blocking me so I turned around just to pysch him out, but then I kicked the ball while _backwards,_ and it went in!”

“That’s just luck,” Denis scoffed.

“No, wait, I’m gonna try it again. Look, check it out.”

He demonstrated his backwards kick, and the ball soared into the net.

“Awwyeah,” he said, “Sooo cool!”

“Duude, that’s so sick,” said Brady, “Let me try.”

“Sure it’s cool, but it’s totally useless!” said Denis, “I mean, in a real game situation.” But he tried it too, looking much cooler than Zachary had, then pushed us into a proper game, Denis on one side and Yasin on the other. They both loved the game, and were good at it, to the extend that I sometimes I wondered why they bothered having us play at all.

*.*.*.*

At long last the final bell rang.

Without looking I put away my trumpet, popping the mouthpiece into its proper spot and deftly sliding the body into the case, which I shut with a satisfying snap. We wandered back to our lockers and I pulled out my backpack from the disaster that was nominally called Brady’s locker, and more literally, a disaster zone. This is where I had put Sophia’s pencil earlier. Could it be that it was already gone? Maybe it would turn up later.

People were heading every which way. Travelling through this sea of people we ran into Zachary, who flagged us down.

“I can’t find Johanna,” he said anxiously, pushing through a gaggle of freshmen girls who were leaving all together, “Do you think she left already?”

“I’m not sure...”

We went outside to look for Johanna. Outside the parking lot was a throng of cars, like a living game of traffic jam, parents coming to pick up their kids in a long line that extended to the streets outside, while others struggled to escape onto the road outside. Across the soccer field a mass exodus was occurring, groups of teenagers, with their backpacks heavy on their back, crawled across the plains towards home. Clumps of students gathered together here and there, while others walked alone.

We went to where Johanna and her friends would often wait for carpool to arrive, but it seems she had already left earlier during class due to a stomach ache, and was no longer there.

“It’s all your fault,” her friend Monica scolded Zachary, “She’s been depressed ever since you broke up with her!”

“What!” he said, “I didn’t break up with her! She’s the one who broke up with _me_! And I didn’t even know it?!”

“Don’t lie, you heart-breaker!”

“C’mon Brady,” said Denis, as poor clueless Zachary struggled with forces he knew nothing about, “Let’s go wait at the library.”

We doubled around the school to the nearby public library, where students would go after class to study or to wait for their parents. Jason came with us, since it was on the way to his house. On the way over, we met Kitty and Jessica, and another girl I didn’t know very well, who when they saw us giggled and waved enthusiastically.

“Hey Brady!” said Kitty, running over, “That was fun at last week’s Sharing, wasn’t it, Brady?”

“Yeah,” I said, “It was pretty cool.”

“You’re coming to the one tomorrow too, right?”

“Yeah, for sure!”

“It’s visitor day, haha! I’m soooo excited! Heeey~~” she said as if an idea just occurred to her, “Anyone here wanna come with?!”

“Nah, can’t,” said Jason, “I’ve got guitar lessons.”

“Oh okay…” said Kitty, “Wow, I didn’t know you played the guitar, Jason! That’s like, so coool~~~!?”

“Yeah, I even like, write my own music and stuff,” he said, flipping his hair modestly out of his eyes.

“Woooooow~~!” said Kitty, very impressed. She was impressed with everything anyone ever said, you barely had to open your mouth and Kitty was there, her eyes trailing yours enthusiastically, prepared to fall into rapturous joy the moment a word tumbled out. She giggled at everything, she was always gushing, happy, positive, enthusiastic. Hers was a hyperbolic happiness that seemed to hide a sort of desperation.

At long last, Denis’ mother arrived, and we drove home together, dropping me off a block before so I could walk to my house.

“How was your day?” my mother asked. She happened to be home for once.

“Good,” I said. I went up into my room. Brady’s room, I suppose.

And that’s how my days passed, one after another, tedious day after tedious day. It was utterly inane.


	5. Chapter 5

The Sharing took place in the upstairs of the local community center, in an empty room also used for dance classes without any chairs or tables. When we wanted chairs and tables we had to set them up ourselves every week, wheeling out stacks of chairs from the closet and setting them up in a tedious ritual that probably ‘built character’, something which the organization was overly fond of saying they were doing.

As I walked through the hall to the meeting I could hear the peal of laughter and small talk, and looking through the first door I could see people, of students and parents, groups of friends, family and strangers, milling about in a festive attitude, holding onto napkins stocked high with chocolates and cakes.

It was visitor day.

I sighed, and putting my hands in my pocket I plunged in. I browsed the various exhibitions they had set up at the tables, snagging myself a free pen (I could use it in place of the pencil we had lost) while scanning the crowd for someone I knew. I was hoping to find Mereth, but instead I ran into Danny Chung. He was standing alone near the snack table, helping himself to cheese and crackers. I liked Danny. He was always good for an interesting conversation. I poured myself a cup of punch.

“Didn’t bring anyone for visitor’s day?” I asked him.

“No,” he shrugged, “I don’t really have any one to bring.”

“No one?”

“Not really. I’m not as popular as you are, you know.”

“Oh please.”

“It’s alright. Life isn’t a popularity contest, you know? It’s better to determine your own sense of self than let others determine it for you.”

He was always uttering chunks of wisdom like that.

“And how exactly do you do that?”

But unfortunately I did not have time to find out, as I was interrupted by a loud lilting voice.

“Daaaannny! How are you~~~”

I was surprised to see a pretty blond girl plowing through the crowd towards Danny.

“…Is that Ashley?” I asked, “Why does she want to talk to _you_?”

Danny shrugged and smiled, “I guess we’ll find out,” he said, and waved at Ashley and her group of friends who was rapidly approaching.

“Hey Brady~~,” said Kitty, clinging to Ashley’s arm and giggling, “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, throwing away my empty cup, “I was just leaving”.

“Eeeeeh?~” said Ashley, standing with her hands in her hips in front of me, “What’s with that reaction? Brady Williams!?”

She leaned closer and pouted, “Aren’t you happy to see me.”

“Not really,” I said, “Just because we go to the same school doesn’t mean we’re friends.”

She laughed.

“Charming as always!” she said, “But we have a visitor here, so why don’t you try and act nice for a bit?”

“Oh.”

Indeed, there was a girl I didn’t recognize among them. She wasn’t in any of our classes, so I assumed she was in a different grade, probably a freshman.

“This is Sarah,” said Kitty, and then lowered her voice conspiringly, “ _She’s a voluntary!_ ”

“This is Danny,” Ashley was saying to the new girl, “He’s a voluntary host too.”

 “Danny used to be really unpopular,” explained Kitty, “The Sharing changed his life!”

“Yeah,” said Danny, “Life is great. I’m showered with laurels of honour each day.”

“See,” said Ashely, “You’ve definitely made the right choice. We’re all friends here.”

She smiled and wrapped her arms around Danny.

“Yeah, don’t force it too much,” I said.

“Hmmm…. Did _you_ bring anyone in today Brady?” Kitty asked, tilting her head and staring at me, wide eyed and innocent.

“I was,” I said, a little annoyed, “But unfortunately something came up so they couldn’t come.”

She smiled at me glibly. 

“Oh really?”

Danny and Sarah went off to talk.

“See Zecron, that’s how it’s done,” said Ashley after they left, her hands triumphantly on her hips, “We got another controller, and a voluntary too. Step up your game, scrub!”

*.*.*.*.*

Mereth hadn’t brought anyone either. She had told me multiple times, bragged to me, even, that she was going to bring her boyfriend, Francisco (he was a real classy guy, she would add in parenthesis, not like those chumps she had dated in the past), but when the day finally came she arrived empty-handed. I was unimpressed – she had been singing this man’s praises for so long, but now he couldn’t even be bothered to show up? Mereth explained that Francisco didn’t believe in the Sharing. It was a vestige of a colonial past, it inducted you in neo-capitalist values, in short, utterly bourgeouis.

“Did he actually say,  ‘ _bourgeois’_?” I snorted, “What an asshole.”

“If you even bothered to get to know him,” Mereth said tartly, “You’d see that wasn’t true. Francisco’s a nice guy.”

“If he really was a nice guy, he’d have come with you.”

“Oh come on! I’m not talking about this with you.”

I had known Mereth for a long time. We’d served together as Hork-bajirs in the army; that’s how we had met. Back then… things had been simpler. We would stay up late at night talking, about life, about the stars that surrounded us, the shimmering galaxies and nebulae we passed in our ships, about the glorious future of the yeerk empire we imagined was inevitable, when we would all have homes and proper bodies and be happy. Our imagination flourished in the cold empty vacuum of space, dreary shifts on empty ships, sitting idle in our barracks, nothing could keep us down, together we dreamed of a beautiful future and discussed our lofty ideals.

I got a human host first: a middle-aged salaryman named Robert, and we promised each other that our separation wouldn’t be long, she’d get a host soon too, and we would meet up and talk just like we used to. Finally, she too got a host, a woman named Holly, who owned a small studio apartment she could barely afford and painted paintings that hardly ever sold.

The first month, I often came to see her, and she was floating on a cloud of euphoria. “It’s wonderful!” she told me, “It’s just so… beautiful to be a human, so amazing, to be alive and to be on this planet. I love the feeling of the wind and the sky, the whistle of the trees, the feeling of rain on your skin, I love…EVERYTHING.”

She spent her time furiously painting, trying to capture this wonderful joy she felt onto canvas. She showed them to me – strange abstract things, paint splashed upon a canvas. I didn’t understand them, so she explained them to me, all the things she had learned in an art school she had never attended.

The paintings sold, gradually, but rarely. It was not enough to live off of. She gave art lessons, but it was never enough. She complained of her age, her creaking bones. Holly was not young anymore, she had been born in the sixties, she looked as if she still lived in the sixties, a flower child, drifting, creating. She became more withdrawn, different, stranger. At times she would be as delirious with happiness as those first few months, then suddenly he would burst out in tears, and I didn’t understand it, I didn’t understand what was _wrong_ with her. She picked up strange habits from this human, I thought.

I came to check on her, occasionally, to clean her cluttered apartment, with piles of paper and garbage floating up to the ceiling, to make sure that she had eaten, to bring her to the yeerk pool to feed. I was afraid if I didn’t, she would forget. She nearly had forgotten, in the past.

Then one day I had come to find Francisco in her apartment, sitting on her table in his fussy well-dressed manner, writing something on paper. The draft of his latest screenplay, he explained to me. There was something about him I instantly disliked – maybe it was the way he dressed, like something out of a period movie, the way he quoted song lyrics as if he had said something extraordinary profound.

It seemed unreasonable to dislike him; he looked after Holly well, he made sure she ate, he drove her places, encouraged her. He was better than Holly’s previous boyfriends,  who would drop by her apartment reeking of drugs and alcohol, would last a few weeks and then disappear. I thought Francisco would have a similar transitive property, but for some reason he lasted longer than the others.

And she was happy. But there a tight smugness about him when she agreed with him, gushed over him, as if it were natural that she should love him, and a strange hint of exasperation in his manner when he dealt with her, as if he were just tolerating her eccentricities out of a benign natural kindness, that infuriated me. Or maybe I was just jealous, because before Francisco, I had been the special person that Mereth had turned to.

“Okay, okay, let’s forget about Francisco,” I told Mereth, “We can have a good time without him.”

“Yeah,” she said, “Alright. So how was school today?”

I rolled my eyes. I don’t know why she was always asking me this. “About what you’d expect. Biology was kind of interesting today though. We started a new unit.”

“That’s great! What are you doing in Biology now?”

She touched my arm sympathetically. I wished she wouldn’t do that. Stand so close to me, I mean. She had never used to do that. It was something that Holly would do, not her. But she was staring at me as if I were important, waiting for me to answer as if I had important things to say, and so I could never bear to tell her to move away.

“Taxonomy,” I said, speaking up to be heard over the crowd, “You know, the classification of living things.”

“Not really.”

“Basically it’s like…the differences between mammals and birds and things, right?”

“That’s interesting! Actually, I was wondering sometime back. Okay, so I know that humans are mammal, right? But… What are yeerks?”

“Oh, I know this! It’s the same class as worms. But I forget the name”

“That’s kind of….”

“Degrading, yeah. They rank them too, from evolved to less evolved. And of course, according to the textbook we’re on the lower end. Isn’t that typical.”

“Aaah,” Mereth sighed, “What does it mean to be ‘more evolved’ anyway! They used to think that Africans were less evolved. Why do we have to order everything like this anyway?”

 “Oh my gaaawwd~~,” interrupted a lilting voice. It was Kitty again. That is, Veeska 921, to be more proper. She grabbed my arm and giggled, “Why are you talking about Africans? Are you racist?”

“What do you want?” I asked, shaking her off. I could tolerate Mereth touching me but Kitty was just annoying.

“Hmmm~” she said, “I wanted to ask you something, yeah? Ok, you’re friends with Denis Bouchard, right?”

“Sure.”

“Where does he live? What’s his phone number? Give me the deets.”

“Why do you care?”

“Just curious~. He’s kinda cute tho, isn’t he?”

Mereth looked amused. She was always amused by my high school friends in the Sharing. She would go talk to them on her own and come to me after, laughing at the things they had said. She was always asking me who was dating who. She said it was better than a movie. Personally, I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly want to subject them to such torture.

I told Kitty everything I knew about Denis. I didn’t really care. I would lose nothing by telling her, and what nefarious deeds she did with the information was none of my business.

“By the way,” I asked her before she left, “Who invited this Sarah girl? You or Ashley?”

“Me of course~!” she said, sticking out her tongue and winking cheerfully, “Ashley brought Johanna, see? Of course she doesn’t know what the Sharing _really_ is.”

I looked, and indeed, there was Johanna herself, a tall pretty girl with long curly brown hair and faint freckles, talking to Ashley and a few other kids from my high school.

“Oooh, is that _the_ Johanna?” Mereth asked eagerly, “I’ve heard so much about her! Is she still together with Zachary?”

“I think they broke up,” I told her. Kitty, dancing away from us, had already rejoined the group, and was clasping Johanna’s arm, laughing at something she had said. 

“What?! Again?!” Mereth laughed, “Nooo! Oh my god, Zecron, we need to go talk to her!”

“Why do you even care?” I asked exasperatedly, “She’s just trying to get attention.”

“I just think its funny,” she said merrily, “Oh to be young again! I never went to high school, you know.”

“You certainly didn’t miss much.”

The room was loud. We practically had to shout to be heard, standing close to the edge of the room, speaking into each others ears. But when Sub-Visser 84 clapped her hands, the droning room soon fell silent.

“Everyone! I want to thank you all for coming tonight. You’ve all made this night really precious and we’re _so glad_ to have you here.”

Sub-Visser 84 was a tall, slim women with a short bob of hair. She was on the city council, she was on the parent-teacher association of her school and her church’s lady aid and a variety of interest groups. She was firmly Republican, and often spoke on the importance of family values. She had three children whom she loved (to speak about) and who did not know she was a yeerk. Her speech was peppered with superlatives drawled out in a saccharine manner.

“I hope you’ve all had as an _excellent_ time as we have, getting to know us here at the Sharing. But now we’re really exciting, really proud, to show you the _main event_. We’ve been preparing something _extra special_ for you all, so if you could all proceed downstairs…!”

A murmur rushed through the crowd as the visitors looked around at each other, wondering what this could be about. Those who had invited them quickly reassured them, saying what an excellent thing they had prepared, how excited they’ll be to see it. Slowly the masses were herded toward the door.

“One at a time please, one at a time!” Sub-Visser 84 said pleasantly. “Why don’t we head down in groups?”

Some of our members acted as ushers, directed the crowd, letting us out group by group through the choke-point of the door.

Down the stairs we went, down and down, long past what should have been the first floor. Some people began to murmur again. They turned around, but the press of people behind them was unsatiable, they were pushed forward. It always struck me how docile humans were, in the end. We did not threaten them or force them. They simply went down the stairs, down to the yeerk pool, down to their own slavery. And by the time they realized the truth, it was too late.

As they emerged into the dank underground arena which was the yeerk pool and saw the dangerous glint of the razors of the hork-bajirs, they remained silent, only a frightened glimmer awoke in their eyes. They looked around, wondering what could be happening, where could they be, why was this happening to them? One person at last began to shout, to scream and struggle – a guard hit them on the side of the head and she fell over. They watched meekly as she fell.

We separated ourselves. We surrounded the humans, they stood, cowed and unsure, suddenly seeming smaller in the vast expanse of the pool.

“I’ll explain it to you once, humans,” sneered Sub-Visser 84, “You are now under the dominion of the yeerk empire. Resistance is futile. Surrender, or we’ll take your bodies by force.”

And some did surrender. Some tried to resist, but to no avail. Those who already knew, who had agreed to be go voluntarily, separated themselves from the rest. I picked out the form of the girl from my school, Sarah, among them. She seemed timid and afraid. She looked back at the others pityingly.

“Is that all?” asked Sub-Visser 84, glancing coldly over the crowd. “Well,” she said, when no-one said a word, “Let’s get this over with then.”

She gestured to the hork-bajir guard and they moved forward, flanking each human on either side. One by one, the humans were dunked into the pool, and one by one, a new controller walked out.

Inside my head, Brady watched horrified. He wanted to look away. I kept my eyes on the proceedings, watching, cool and impassive, as the individualism, the choices, as the very being of each human in line was slowly submerged and drowned. 

It was horrible, horrifying for him and I made sure he watched it. But at the same time I could sense his gratitude, his thankfulness.

 _Thank God_ , he repeated to himself, somewhere deep inside his heart. _Thank God my mother had to work today._

Sub-Visser 84 strolled leisurely across the yeerk pool, her head flung up smugly, proud that everything was proceeding as planned. She paused in front of me.

“You didn’t bring a visitor this time did you, Zecron 613?” she asked.

“I’ll bring her next week,” I promised, “Something came up, but she promised she’ll come next week. We can infest her then.”

“Please do~” she said “If we all work hard together, then we’ll be sure to get more recruits than _Sub-Visser 71_.” At this final word, her voice dripped with contempt. I had never met Sub-Visser 71, but in my mind he had taken legendary proportions – he loomed in the imagination of our group like some kind of yeerk hitler.

And I was happy to sense the fear that now crept up in Brady, that he tried to hide but couldn’t, because he couldn’t hide from me.

And the sound of human flesh hitting water echoed through the chambers, interspersed, occasionally, by a hopeless scream.


	6. Chapter 6

I was in a different country now.

Everything around me struck me as strangely foreign, and it made me realize how accustomed I had become to America. When had I become American? I wondered. It’s not as if I had been born there. It’s not as if I belonged there.

I suppose I had became American when I come to earth –and  I had not realized until this moment, perhaps, that to be a human, to be on earth, was not equivalent to being American. I guess this was something yeerks took for granted. But this was something that Kalish had never taken for granted – perhaps that is why he moved here, why he had ultimately chosen the morph he did.

“Why choose a minority?” I had asked him at the time, “We’re already going to be a minority, you don’t need to _look_ like one.” But he told me, “Well, I don’t plan to stay _here_.”

And now _I_ was the minority, or, that is, I looked like one. On this planet I will always be an alien but until now I had not felt it so very acutely. Maybe it was jet-lag that increased on the feelings of foreignness, the feelings of strangeness, of disorientation. There is something very disorienting about sitting in a dark cramped space for hours upon hours, only to emerge and find yourself millions of miles away from where you began, in an entirely different place. It disconnects you. It’s like opening the door to your apartment one morning and finding yourself on a different continent.

And yet I had been once here before. Memories crowded my head – offices, men in suits, the small cramped room where he had once stayed. Not my memories, and yet I remembered it. It was Robert, he had come here once before, on a business trip. But he had not liked it. He found it too cramped, too different. Too far from his comfort zone. But even going out of state filled him with a similar anxiety, and once he had gone to Oregon and it took him weeks to recover. Robert’s comfort zone was the size of the eye of a needle – composed of his home and his office and the road in between them.

I remembered how he had stared up at the sky, hoping to see that same blue sky which covered both here and his far-away home, but the sky was covered in smog. A similar smog covered the city today. Thick and hot and humid. I could not see the sky.

Maybe it was just my eyes, weary from sleep, that exaggerated the differences, the unfamiliarity, the remembrance of Robert’s discomfort, or just a hidden prejudice. I knew it would be strange and unfamiliar. I had always thought so. Maybe that’s what I had counted on. And so I was annoyed to find that after only a few hours I had become accustomed to it, it was different, but at the same time it was familiar, the tall reaching skyscrapers, the bursting modernity, the crowds of busy people.

Kalish promised me he would meet me in front of his apartment, but first I had to find it. All the buildings looked the same to me, high and intimidating. I fumbled on my phone, texting him for directions, and the people on the street passed around me as if I was a rock in the middle of a stream. The air was full of shouts and honking, thick noise that floated through a thick sky. People were everywhere.

I was still looking at my phone when I heard someone calling my name and I saw a strange man waving at me, and only after I stammered an awkward hello did I realize that it must be Kalish.

In my mind I had pictured him the same as he looked in high school, small and plump, round as a dumpling, covered in sweat. When I thought of Kalish I could only see fat and pathetic Daniel Chung, not this short, broad-shouldered man in front of me now.

He smiled at me. It was the same smile he would often give to me at school when no one else was looking, a kind and gentle smile, but always somewhat wry.

“Hey,” he said, “Nice to see you,” as if it had been only yesterday when we last met.

Calmly, he picked up my suitcase and directed me to his apartment. It was with the same calmness that he had answered my phone call that night – it had been late for him, I know, deep in the bowels of night – and I had asked him abruptly and without warning whether I could possibly stay with him for a bit. “Sure,” he had said nonchalantly, “Stay as long as you like. When will you be here?” And with the same calmness, the same composed grace, he had said, “Here, let me give you directions,” when I told him that it would be now, I was in the city that very instance.

I had always envied his composure, how he seemed to always have everything together.

“The apartment’s a bit small,” he told me, opening his door, “But it will be alright.”

The apartment really was small, not a humble exaggeration as I had assumed. It was narrow, the bedroom and the living room and the bathroom and the kitchen somehow all fitted together into a miniature square. It made me feel guilty, all of a sudden, to impose on him like this. But when I apologized he waved me off. “It’s fine,” he said, “What are friends for?”

But I wouldn’t know. I had never been a very good friend.

*.*.*.*.*

Later Kalish took me out to eat. It was evening, but the streets were still not dark. Only the black of a distant unseeable sky indicated an approaching night. I followed Kalish through the unfamiliar streets. His back retreated always ahead of me, and I followed, afraid that if I paused for an instance to drink in the strange sights they would swallow me up forever.

He stopped at a streetside stall. “ _Ni hao_ ,” said Kalish to the shopkeepr, the only word I recognized in a stream of foreign speech. He seemed familiar with the shopkeeper; they talked and laughed and exchanged pleasantries. I heard my name, and Kalish pointed at me and shopkeeper smiled widely and nodded.

“Anything you want?” Kalish asked. I looked at the menu, scrawled at the back of the stall, written entirely in Chinese.

“Hm. I’ll trust your expertise.”

He ordered something for me.

We waited for the food silently, sitting down at a nearby table. It was muggy outside and hot; back home, the nights were chilly and crisp. My shirt was drenched in sweat. Kalish’s arm rested gently on the table clutching his cup of tea. It rested there, tan and immobile. I broke my chopsticks apart and clacked them experimentally in my hand. I wasn’t sure how to hold them right. But Kalish didn’t offer to help me; he didn’t say anything at all. I silently set the chopsticks on the table. The steam rose from our noodles and melt into the sky. High above us, sky scrapers towered, and high above that was a distant but unseeable sky smattered with stars. Somewhere out there was our home – the yeerk homeworld, that is. We had come from this distant world of stars – from a hundred and thousand miles away, and yet somehow we had ended up sitting at a table in a crowded evening market here together. A few days ago I had been in America. A few years ago we had both been in America, and we had sat outside in the crisp evening air one night after the Sharing, looking at the stars, not saying anything in particular. And now we were here. And I felt, as I had on the plane ride over, that I had done so little to get here, just sat and waited, and time had washed me up on some foreign shore.  

Finally he took a sip of tea. He held the cup quietly in his hands. I realized that I was hungry. Ravenous really. The last time I had eaten was on the plane. I held the chopsticks clumsily in my hand and stabbed at my noodles. Kalish looked at me for the first time since he had sat down.

“Here,” he said, and showed me how he held his chopsticks. “You’ve pretty much got it.”

“Like this…?”

“That’s right,” he said, but his gestures said otherwise, he repositioned his hands on the chopstick and clacked them together, ‘like this’ he was saying.

But he didn’t say this, instead he said, after a pause, “It’s been a long time.”

“…Yeah.” I said, after a pause. I concentrated on my noodles.

 “So how’s work?” I asked him, desperate for something to say. For him to say something so that I didn’t have to.

“It’s good,” he said, and described to me all the latest advancements in robotics, flying, on occasion, into technical terms and language that I could not understand, but I nodded my head anyways, encouraging him to continue. Just keep talking. And don’t talk about me.

“What it comes down to is the dilemma of free will,” he was saying, and I wondered how exactly he had arrived at this topic. “But that’s a different issue entirely.”

“Hm.” I agreed mindlessly.

“What do you think?”

 “Hm? Me?”

I was startled out of my complacency, my heart beat faster in panic.

“Oh well, I don’t really know…” I said, waving off the question, “It’s impossible to say really.”

He looked at me in surprise.

I felt cowardly, all of a sudden, and ashamed. I could see the question in his eyes; the same question that was in my own eyes, staring back at me, the eyes of my younger self.

But I didn’t have an answer.


End file.
